The Public Sector Catalogue, one year on

by Geoff Prowling, Head of Enterprise & Public Sector Sales Enablement

“You don’t get older, you get better.” In January 2016, we launched the O2 Public Sector Catalogue designed specifically to support public sector organisations. I wanted to take this opportunity, a year on from the launch, to reflect on how it has evolved, the impact it’s had in the marketplace, and how we plan to adapt it moving forward to keep pace with the changing needs of public sector organisations.

Over the last 24 months, public sector IT procurement has increased in complexity so we based the catalogue around the principles of simplicity, transparency and innovation. It was important we created a tool that could make public sector procurement easier to understand and deliver.

With hundreds of customer registrations in the first month of launch, it became clear that we needed to ensure this was an ever-evolving catalogue, and a catalogue manager was charged to ensure market feedback is reflected in how the catalogue is updated. One year on, and while the catalogue maintains its founding principles, it has significantly evolved with a number of new features:

The Value Calculator– We created a tool that provided a simple way to estimate the likely cost of mobile voice and data with O2. It enables customers to build an instant Total Cost of Ownership model to include in their business case.

Productivity Calculator– Another powerful tool accessed through the catalogue can help organisations work out how much more productive they could be by embracing smarter working and connectivity.

Standard Service Offers from O2– Feedback from our customers was that buying via Direct Award through Standard Service Offers (SSOs) was incredibly simple. So we created a whole section showcasing all our SSOs across the Network Services agreement.

Our Areas– A section of the catalogue devoted to each of our verticals and how O2 are helping address the sector specific challenges that organisations face on a daily basis.

Search bar– O2 offers organisations a wide range of products and services. We wanted to give users the ability to instantly search for what they were looking for, ultimately speeding up the procurement process.

The next 12 months are certain to bring heightened levels of uncertainty within public sector. While there is little we as suppliers can do to influence this, there is no doubt that simplicity should be put at the heart of everything we do. It is by doing this that we hope to be celebrating the success of the Public Sector Catalogue for many years to come.